This failed project was a first stab at creating something for The Art of… Scent.

Lush Cosmetics is a big deal where I live, as their head office & factory are close by in Poole. They are an amazing company, who seem to genuinely adhere to their values in every aspect of how they work.

Anyway, they have a highly fun and creative approach to producing their bath bombs, so I thought I would be inspired and make my own.

Out of air dry clay I sculpted a rough round gargoyle head, with the distinctive feature being its nose – all the better to smell you with – and then created a plaster mold (harking way back to Moulding and Casting). This process was a bit of a disaster because I thought I had sealed the container for the mould, but I hadn’t, and the plaster kept leaking everywhere.

When I had finally got the mold sorted I pulled out the head, destroying it in the process, and then made the bath bomb. There are zillions of online recipes, and I went for a lavender-based one, because my wife happened to have lavender essential oil. I also got my three year old daughter involved, who made her own little heart-shaped bath fizzers with the leftover bath bomb mix.

The hardest thing about making the mix was adding the oil, and trying not to make it fizz up the citric acid in the mix!

So I packed it as hard as I could into the mould (and used a plastic bauble case for the back of the head) and left it over night. When I came to remove it, it wouldn’t come out, and I was really wary of exerting any effort becaise of the risk of it crumbling.

So I spent ages chipping away at the mould with a chisel until I could ease it out, and it was all going well until the bath bomb broke in half, leaving bits in the mould. When I scraped them out, it was too much of a mess to even attempt to put it all back together again.

Ah well, it was fun trying, and at least I can now enjoy a relaxing bath.